Non-uniform partitioning for collaborative execution on heterogeneous architectures

Since the demand for computing power increases, new architectures arise to obtain better performance. An important class of integrated devices is heterogeneous architectures, which join different specialized hardware into a single chip, composing a System on Chip - SoC. Within this context, effectively splitting tasks between the different architectures is primal to obtain efficiency and performance. In this work, we evaluate two heterogeneous architectures: one composed of a general-purpose CPU and a graphics processing unit (GPU) integrated into a single chip (AMD Kaveri SoC), and another composed by a general-purpose CPU and a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) integrated into a single chip (Intel Arria 10 SoC). We investigate how data partitioning affects the performance of each device in a collaborative execution through the decomposition of the data domain. As a case study, we apply the technique in the well-known Lattice Boltzmann Method (LBM), analyzing the performance of five kernels in both architectures. Our experimental results show that non-uniform partitioning improves LBM kernels performance by up to 11.40% and 15.15% on AMD Kaveri and Intel Arria 10, respectively.